Conspiracy theorists have raised an alarm that ongoing AWAKE experiments at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility near Geneva in Switzerland triggered the recent series of earthquakes that hit central Italy and killed more than 250 people.

According to the bizarre claim presented in a video titled “Stargate Awakens at CERN,” uploaded to YouTube on November 5, 2016, by conspiracy theorist BPEarthWatch, recent high-energy AWAKE experiments at the CERN LHC facility located near the French-Swiss border harnessed and unleashed unknown forces that triggered the series of tremors and quakes.

The quakes, the first of which occurred in August, destroyed buildings and historical monuments, which caused loss of human lives in central Italian towns, such as Amatrice and the mountain village, Castelluccio di Norcia, according to the Globe and Mail.

But CERN authorities in Geneva have reportedly denied the conspiracy theory claims that AWAKE experiments at the LHC facility caused the earthquakes.

The 16-mile ring-shaped LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and collider machine. It accelerates charged particles, such as protons, to very high energy levels close to the speed of the light before causing them to collide.

The purpose of accelerating and colliding fundamental particles is to simulate high-energy conditions that occurred in the universe soon after the Big Bang. The goal of scientists is to unravel the small scale interactive forces underlying the structure of the universe as we know it.

According to CERN, the Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment (AWAKE) is an investigation of the use of “plasma wakefields driven by a proton bunch” to accelerate charged fundamental particles to high energies before bringing them into collision as a way of probing even deeper into the secrets of the origin of our universe.

Scientists hope that a breakthrough in the use of “plasma wakefields” to accelerate fundamental charged particles — instead of the current method that relies on the use of superconducting magnets — could mean that engineers do not have to build bigger and bigger particle accelerators to achieve higher and higher energies because the “plasma wakefields” would be able to accelerate particles to higher energy levels over shorter distances.

“When Obama was in Norway receiving his Nobel Peace Prize, a micro black hole opened up in the sky above his city.”